Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Kelly Rohrbach, Alexandra Daddario, Ilfenesh Hadera, Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron and Jon Bass (Paramount Pictures, Montecito Picture Company, FlynnPicture Co., and Fremantle Productions)
What better way to start the summer movie season than with a silly blockbuster starring the reliable Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Well you may want to adjust your already-low expectations for this big-screen reboot of the mindless TV series. The movie has already earned an impressively low 20 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and from the sound of it, even the likable Rock has some explaining to do. The Post’s Stephanie Merry writes that the movie “is a litmus test for how low Johnson can sink while still winning us over.” Stay tuned for a full review from SFist.
Watch the trailer.
Now playing everywhere.
Bryan Cranston (Gilles Mingasson/IFC Films)
Adapted from a short story by E. L. Doctorow, this domestic drama follows the misadventures of Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston), who after a power outage spends the night in his second-story garage—and then decides to stay there, where he can watch his wife (Jennifer Garner) and twin daughters react to the prospect of a missing and presumed dead patriarch. Cranston completely sells his character, a selfish family man who breaks down from the pressures of a big Manhattan job and walks away from a seemingly perfect life. The actor can make a character watchable even while he refuses to make him likable. But while its star convincingly shifts from sit-com father figure to a gruff scavenger, the film’s tone is a bit too cute to fully immerse itself in its character’s madness, too often retreating to the comfort of Wakefield’s former life, told in flashbacks. Still, Cranston makes this worth watching.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
(Peter Simon/Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video)
I am not a Deadhead, and the prospect of a four-hour documentary about the ur-jam band struck me as a potentially deadly cinematic endurance test as punishing as anything by Béla Tarr’. So I am grateful to report that this is a thoroughly engrossing rock documentary with none of the noodling longeurs that might drive away the hippiephobic. Director Amir Bar-Lev speaks with the surviving members of the band and features vintage interviews with Jerry Garcia, but this is neither your standard talking-head structure nor the now common blend of live footage with animated reenactments. Framed by scenes from the horror classic Frankenstein, the film is structured into acts that intercut its various sources, achieving an interplay much like the musicians achieved on stage. And naturally, the variety of archival material that the band has amassed over the years becomes part of the story. The film makers wisely zero in on charismatic figures behind the scenes as well, like tour manager Sam Cutler, who helpfully critiques the band’s history as he tells it, noting that while it’s a rite of passage for restless Americans to get in a car and drive across the country to “find America,” the English don’t get into a car in search of their country. This is a long trip indeed, but it’s not by any means a hagiography, taking a sober and fascinating journey. The band’s not bad either.
Watch the trailer.
Screens tonight at Landmark E Street Cinema, and Monday, May 29 at the AFI Silver.
(Tandem Film)
Robert is a struggling writer who leaves Bucharest to return to his small town home, where he uncertainly reunites with old classmates, including a high school crush. The National Gallery of Art’s series, Reinventing Realism—New Cinema From Romania continues with this 2015 film from director Andrei Cohn, who imbues the slow rhythms of his native new wave with a dry humor before pulling out the stops for a devastatingly long take that is one of the most awkward would-be love scenes in cinema. Shown with director Ruxandra Zenide’s 2016 drama The Miracle of Tekir, an enigmatic project about a possible virgin birth at Lake Techirghiol, whose thermal waters are thought to have healing properties.
Watch trailers for Back Home and The Miracle at Tekir.
Back Home screens on May 27 at 2 p.m.; The Miracle of Tekir screens on May 27 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building auditorium. Free.
(Drafthouse)
Writer-director Richard Elfman, who co-founded Oingo Boingo with his brother Danny, is behind this 1980 film that the Washington Psychotronic Film Society describe describes as “if Andy Warhol created some pop art after suffering a head injury and a fever while on a hallucinogenic bender.” Hervé Villechaize stars in this “frantic, funny, and occasionally profane blend of Fleischer Brothers cartoons, German Expressionism, Depression-era musicals, and ’60s underground movies. It feels so good to be so bad.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, May 29 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week, a town drunk (Johnny Depp) wanders into a fifty-year old amusement park ride in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales; we’ll have a full review tomorrow.
